40 Ashura pilgrims killed in Iraq

BAGHDAD: Bombers killed 36 people in two attacks on Shiite worshippers marking the climax of the religious ritual of Ashura near Baghdad on Tuesday and gunmen killed four pilgrims in an ambush in the capital.   

The attacks on the final day of the week-long annual Ashura mourning rite, the highpoint of the Shi’ite religious calendar, came amid heightened tensions between the country’s majority Shi’ites and once politically dominant minority Sunnis.

Fearing a possible strike by insurgents, Iraqi authorities had deployed 11,000 police and soldiers to the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala, focus of the commemoration that marks the death in battle of the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson there 1,300 years ago.

The fears were fuelled by the discovery of what Iraqi officials said was a plot by a messianic Muslim cult to target senior Shi’ite clerics in the holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad at the climax of Ashura this week.

Iraqi security forces backed by US tanks, helicopters and jet fighters fought a fierce day-long battle with the “Soldiers of Heaven” near the city on Sunday in which one US helicopter crashed. Iraqi officials said the cult’s leader was also killed.

Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said on Tuesday the final toll from the battle was 263 killed. A total of 502 “Soldiers of Heaven” followers had been arrested, including 210 wounded.   

Ashura has been a target in the past for radical Sunni militants who view the Shi’ite sect - a majority in Iraq but a minority in the Islamic world - as heretics. Suicide bombings and other attacks on Ashura crowds in Kerbala and Baghdad killed 171 people in March 2004.

This time, the bombers appeared to have focused on less well-protected targets in other Iraqi towns. In the first blast, 13 people were killed, including three women and a teenage boy, and 39 wounded when a roadside bomb hit a procession of Shi’ites in the town of Khanaqin northeast of Baghdad.

Shortly afterwards, a suicide bomber blew himself up among worshippers outside a Shi’ite mosque in the town of Balad Ruz, about 80 km to the south of Khanakin, killing 23 people and wounding 57, police said.

Gunmen also attacked two minibuses carrying pilgrims returning from Najaf in Baghdad’s southwestern Bayaa district, killing four and wounding nine.